@OPA: A Walk on the leading edge
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 9 March 2007 at 11:30
Tags: Online Publishers Association
Reuters Media President Chris Ahearn says news agencies are changing. He calls for the earlier journalism/blogging debate to end because both sides are the same side of the coin: how to make readers smarter. Someone behind me has already muttered some inaudible objection. No doubt the row will continue…
Ahearn says free blogging software (like the one used to run this blog) is probably more powerful, from a journalist’s point of view than what most publishers are using in their newsrooms. One place to start innovating, he says, is to start reusing cheap technology that is available in the consumer space and is, in some cases, better than what the profesisonals are using.
He praises the Guardian’s aim, mentioned yesterday, to become “the world’s leading liberal voice” as a good example of a media company setting an aim possible in the new media evironment and pursuing it. Media businesses need to recognise that they will not necessarily be the sort of companies that they were in the past. CNN’s web site runs a lot of text, the New York Times runs a lot of video. Reuters have a lot of video too. The future, he says, is to put the tools to contribut this into the hands of users. But this isn’t a rejection of the traditional journalistic concern for truth. Discussion is good for good for governance and democracy, but also good for circulation.
The debate continues: Martin Nisenholtz says the debate is not between blogging and journalism, but between edited, moderated validated journalistic environments and Google-style algorithmically-constructed aggregating sites. The choice is between making sure that everything that appears within a journalistic brand’s site is checked and verified.
During a brief discussion of trendy Web 2.0 developments in Silicon Valley and Israel, John Lervik of Rapt asks why are innovative web products always being developed by three guys in a garage, rather than big media companies.
Ahearn answers that media companies aren’t known for developing technology, in part because anything too radical and disruptive will be squashed internally.
“Progress is a low-yield operation,” points out moderator Peter Horan, whih is why big companies are averse to trying it. “There are a lot of people in a lot of garages trying a lot of stuff. Ninty per cent of them fail.”
They key to technological innovation, he concludes, is to allow people to fail.
